Intelligence Wars

[Dave Monroe]

Forthcoming ...

Powers, Thomas.  Intelligence Wars:
   American Secret History from Hitler to Al-Qaeda.
   New York: NYRB Books, 2003.

For much of the twentieth century, the American public
was astonishingly innocent about the role of
intelligence organizations in international affairs.
That changed abruptly in 1961, argues Thomas Powers,
when a covert US-backed invasion of Cuba failed all
too conspicuously at the Bay of Pigs. Afterward,
everyone knew about the CIA. By the mid-1970s,
congressional investigations had exposed many of its
darkest secrets—though some questions may never be
answered. 

No one outside the intelligence services knows more
about their culture than Thomas Powers. The essays
collected in this volume, many of which originally
appeared in The New York Review, tell stories of
shadowy successes, ghastly failures, and, more often,
gripping uncertainties. They range from the exploits
of "Wild Bill" Donovan's OSS during the Second World
War, through the CIA's long cold war struggle with its
Russian adversary, to debates about the use of secret
intelligence in a democratic society. Here too are
analyses of the Kennedys and their obsession with
getting rid of Castro, real, suspected, and imagined
Communist spies, the weird worldview of
counterintelligence expert James J. Angleton, the
scandals of Soviet moles Aldrich Ames and Robert
Hanssen, and urgent contemporary issues such as
whether the CIA and the FBI can defend America against
terrorism. 

What emerges from these essays is not just the
episodes, personalities, and controversies of
America's secret history, but a keen sense of what the
intelligence business is like: the kinds of people who
do it, the kinds of things they do well, or badly, and
the ways they try to give the government that employs
them what it wants.

http://www.nybooks.com/shop/product?product_id=1025&offer_code=20030121

http://www.nybooks.com/nyrb/

And note ...

NYRB is pleased to announce the publication of a new
450-page hardcover collection of Powers' essays:
Intelligence Wars: American Secret History from Hitler
to Al-Qaeda. The book will soon be in bookstores
across the United States. As a benefit to news at nybooks
subscribers, we are offering Intelligence Wars for a
limited time at a special price: $16.90, 40% off the
cover price of $27.95.

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